What to Go See This Week: Godzilla (The First One)

Unless you've studiously been avoiding any and all contact with human beings and media sources for the past month, you've seen the ads for Godzilla, the latest American remake to try to do justice to the greatest monster movie of all.

The new Godzilla comes out this Friday (we'll have our review in this week's Mercury), but in the meantime, you've got a chance to see the original on the big screen, just as god (and, more importantly, Godzilla) intended. For the next few days, the Bagdad has a digital restoration of 1954's Godzilla. It's a weird, great movie—one that balances gleefully made-up science (oxygen destroyer!) and hammy melodramatics with a genuinely eerie and discomfiting creepiness. Godzilla came out only nine years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; as a not-so-subtle allegory for real-world mass destruction, Godzilla's ruthless, brutal rampage bears the psychic scars of a traumatized nation.

In the years following the first film's success, Godzilla would go in to star in 48 billion louder, sillier, and more kid-friendly movies—and he'd be faced with the indignities of an Americanized version that crammed in Raymond Burr and an American remake that crammed in Matthew Broderick. We'll see, soon enough, how this new Godzilla works out—but in the meantime, seeing the 1954 classic in a theater is an opportunity you shouldn't miss. The Bagdad is playing it through Thursday afternoon, and showtimes are here.